'Dilbert' Author Endorses Romney, Professional Left Freaks Out

Scott Adams, the creator of the popular comic strip “Dilbert,” endorsed Mitt Romney on his blog Wednesday. The reaction he received from liberal news sites was predictably outraged and, in Adams’ hands, hilarious. Adams chronicled the results of his announcement in a series of updates which point out just how absurd the professional left can be when someone goes off the liberal reservation for any reason.

Granted, Adams’ reasons for endorsing Romney aren’t the usual ones you’ll hear from conservatives about growing debt and a slow-speed economic recovery. The issue Adams takes exception to in his post is Obama’s tough stance on medical marijuana. Adams links to a story on the Huffington Post which outlines how the owner of a marijuana “dispensary” in California is facing ten years to life in prison. Adams suggests that Obama, who used pot frequently in high school as part of the “choom gang,” has taken a tough line purely for political expediency.

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While Adams has no illusions that Romney plans to embrace marijuana legalization, he does believe Romney is more flexible, more of a political pragmatist. And since the issue in this case is California’s right to effectively legalize pot under the rubric of medical marijuana, Adams hopes Romney might be more open to this kind of states’ rights argument.

The post concludes with Adams’ endorsement which is really framed as a rejection of Obama. He writes, “while I don’t agree with Romney’s positions on most topics, I’m endorsing him for president starting today… jailing Americancitizens for political gain simply has to be a firing offense no matterhow awesome you might be in other ways.”

The endorsement did not go over well with the left-wing media. Readers of this site will not find it surprising, that outlets like Gawker, Huff Post and Daily Kos did their best to attack Adams by taking his comments out of context. Adams chronicled the reaction in a series of updates that conservatives should find amusing:

[Update: Congratulations to Politico for being thefirst to take this post out of context. I’m a little disappointed inJezebel, Gawker and Salon for being slow to the party. Are all of theircontext-removers on vacation or something?]

[Update 2:Nipping on the heels of Politico, Mediaite.com weighs in with their ownout-of-context outrage. They managed to throw in some charges of racismand something about rape. Well done.]

[Update 3: Kudos to Reason.comfor doing a good job preserving the context of this post while stillquoting from it. Notice their story headline shows they understand thecentral point of my post. And since their readership probably overlaps alot with mine, my writing makes sense in their environment too. Thatrarely happens. — Scott]

[Update 4: Meanwhile, at Huffington Post, where context goes to die,a key point in my blog post has been summarized as: “. . . cartoonistScott Adams said he’s under the impression Romney would be softer onmarijuana than President Barack Obama.” Is that how you would interpretmy sentence “Romney is likely to continue the same drug policies as theObama administration”? If not, you can’t write for Huffington Post.

[Update 5:Daily Kos takes the context destruction trophy by proudly quoting fromthe Politico article’s out-of-context treatment. Daily Kos scored a rarecontext. Their under-informed readers chimed in to point out that theyare sure I don’t believe in evolution, which I’ve often publicly saidmeets the tests to be called a scientific fact. Another commenter pointsout that I must hate women because the Alice character is getting lesstime in Dilbert. You can’t get that kind of insight anywhere but DailyKos.”